The latest from the National desk

Keep Obama off ballot, Alabama man says; judge will listen

President Obama is using a forged birth certificate. President Obama is using a fake Social Security number. President Obama is not a natural-born citizen.

President Obama is a cyborg who has been sent from the future to kill the boy who will one day head the resistance movement that will challenge the coming New Robot Order.

Every one of those charges -- OK, except for the last one -- is contained in an Alabama lawsuit that seeks to keep the incumbent Democratic president off the ballot in the state's March 13 primary.

The suit was filed by some guy from Birmingham named Albert E. Hendershot, who has claimed to possess a "staggering" amount of evidence about the whole affair.

This morning, Hendershot will have his day in court: According to the Birmingham News, attorneys for the chairman of the Alabama Democratic Party are asking Jefferson County Circuit Judge Helen Shores Lee to throw out the suit on grounds that the whole Obama-is-not-who-he-says-he-is meme is oh-so-2008. The judge was scheduled to consider the matter at a hearing Monday.

When the president posted his so-called long-form Hawaii birth certificate on the White House website last spring, some predicted that conspiracies questioning the legitimacy of Obama's presidency would die off.

But the Alabama lawsuit is not an isolated case. In Georgia, according to Atlanta's WXIA-TV, Republican State Rep. Mark Hatfield, an attorney, is representing voters challenging Obama's right to be on the primary ballot there, on the grounds that Obama can be disqualified because his father was foreign-born.

Another Georgia group is challenging Obama's birth certificate. Its case will be considered Jan. 26 before Georgia Administrative Law Judge Michael Malihi.

The latter group is represented by well-known birth-certificate conspiracy theorist Orly Taitz. WXIA notes that Taitz faces a $20,000 fine after a Georgia judge found one of her citizenship challenges to be "frivolous."